Can an atheist explain why organisms reproduce?

If you wanted to ask a more useful and coherent question you might ask why “animals” or “plants” feel the need to reproduce. For that matter, you might ask a biologist, who would be someone who studies such things, and not an atheist.

Most of nature doesn’t reproduce, period. Rocks, water, air, etc… not doing the reproduction thing. Ok, sure, new stars and planets form out of the ashes of old stars. Older stars didn’t have any planets, since all of the heavy elements — including everything on earth — was formed, directly or indirectly, by the death of an old star.

There are some natural processes that seem related, but really aren’t. There’s the weather cycle: water evaportates, clouds form, rain falls. It’s a cycle based on simple physics, and no reproduction involved. In fact, the rains are slowly washing away the lands.

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And land grows. Volcanos bring hot magma up to become lava flows and eventually new land. Tectonic plates fight each other, occasionally break off some bits, other times push up new mountain ranges. But again, just the physics of the systems on a “living” planet. Living, because we still have the heat of earth’s original formation glowing in its core and powering both these events and the strong magnetic field that makes life — for a geologically brief time — possible here on earth.